random posts

Saturday, 12 March 2016

Via Dark Roasted Blend, we’ve known for some time that instead of the gleaming white marble beauty that frames the highest æsthetics of the Renaissance that formed modern taste and sensibility and that all lovely ruins prior to the neo-classical relaunch must have gone through a period when the gawking public would have dismissed prestige projects as tacky and ostentatious, but it’s always a shock to be reminded how the statues of ancient Greece and Rome were painted like gaudy mannequins.It’s a bit of a let-down, on the order of trying to reconcile the fact that dinosaurs had feathers. Like with having to imagine the twitterpation of the velociraptor, one almost wishes that museum curators had not been able to tease out the traces of pigment that adorned their otherwise sedate and solemn figures to tell us that the Ancients wanted to see their gods and heroes with flesh tones, hair colour and leggings. What do you think? Do you find this equally incongruous?